


the brilliant days and nights

by themorninglark



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, Manga spoilers up to chapter 381, Post-Canon, Road Trips, drifting apart and coming back together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:28:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23983813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themorninglark/pseuds/themorninglark
Summary: Quiet. How quiet Kenma had been, when he answered him, the quiet of a ripple that knows the exact weight of the stone that made it, that does not need the water’s permission to exist.It’s not like they ever agreed, in so many words or any words at all, to go to Hokkaido together. It’s not like they ever said anything abouttogether, then or later, or expected anything, when Kenma put his phone down and looked at Keiji, and Keiji looked back, and swallowed. This time, or any other time when the sunset happened upon them, and decided the silence here was too full already for anything to linger, light or shadow.In which Akaashi and Kenma go to Hokkaido to see the flowers.
Relationships: Akaashi Keiji/Kozume Kenma
Comments: 46
Kudos: 113
Collections: because i know i'll come back XP





	the brilliant days and nights

**Author's Note:**

> Mind the tags! This fic contains spoilers up to chapter 381, which is where we learn what Akaashi's current career is.

_The brilliant days and nights are  
breathless in their hurry. We follow, you and I._

\- Lisel Mueller, "Curriculum Vitae"

Some days, you wake up in the morning and you know exactly how the whole day is going to go. Instant coffee, made with the water set to boil ten minutes after waking up. An egg sandwich still cold from the fridge. One thousand, one hundred and twelve steps to Naka-meguro station at seven in the morning. Not that Keiji’s ever counted them, but that’s what his fitness tracker tells him.

And then some days, you wake up in the morning and you’re on the train to Haneda with a small rolling suitcase, because the times you could go on even a weekend trip with only a duffel are far behind you.

Linoleum flooring that’s more well-used than worn out. The scent of someone’s popcorn karaage fresh from the combini. Hyacinths and baby’s breath. Someone stepping off a taxi has a bouquet in his hands. Another man is wrangling a family of four children while his wife checks in at the counter. _It’s summer, huh._

Keiji hasn’t been to the airport in more than a year. He hasn’t seen Kenma in longer still. In the stands of a stadium in Yoyogi, his hair still had its faded highlights and was long enough to braid; now it’s almost back to black and falls loose just below his shoulders. But it is the slouch, most of all, that Keiji recognises from the back, the way those shoulders are hunched over just a little bit, under an oversized hoodie. Backpack at his feet, a water bottle sticking out of the side pocket that he’s probably forgotten to fill.

Walking up to him from behind, satchel slung over one shoulder and suitcase rattling across the airport floor, footsteps speeding up before he realises it, Keiji feels seventeen all over again. Seventeen, crossing the length of a gym to say to Kenma, _hey_.

Some days, you wake up in the morning and think, with a crystal clarity, you will do the same things you did the day before, in the same order, and you will have _tonjiru_ at the same little restaurant as always when you leave your office and it’s too late for dinner anywhere else.

“Hey,” says Keiji.

Kenma looks up. He smiles. “You came.”

“Yeah. I did.”

And some days, you wake up in the morning and tear the page off your calendar and before you can toss it into the bin, you feel you are holding a palmful of butterflies, confetti butterflies, and you open your hand and the wind is warm through your window, and you have never been a winged thing, not like so many people you have known and looked up to. Your feet have always been planted firmly on the ground.

Not today.

* * *

_akaashi. are you free this weekend._

_Kozume Kenma_ where the sender’s name should be doesn’t make any sense. It’s there, nonetheless. No matter how Keiji closes his messages, puts his phone down and walks to the copier to duplicate and file all his invoices, it’s still there.

The last time Kenma had texted him was six months ago, and before that, one year and six months exactly. _thanks. same to you_ , in response to Keiji’s polite _Happy New Year. May the coming year bring you fulfilment and prosperity._ Keiji can see their history above this new message, generic exchanges that could have been between anyone. Acquaintances. Colleagues. Strangers passing on a hot night in the temple grounds.

Keiji gets up, goes to the pantry and washes out his bento box thoroughly, wipes it dry, then washes the lid again for good measure before returning to his desk. The cup of tea he made earlier is now tepid. He picks up his phone again. The message is still there.

_Hello Kozume. I hope you’ve been well. Why do you ask?_

_would you like to go to hokkaido._

Keiji stares at his screen. After a moment, the little animated ellipsis pops up, showing Kenma’s still typing.

_with me._

In case it wasn’t clear, Keiji supposes.

His fingers are curling tight round his phone, wrist tensing up right where the sore spot always is. _You’ll get carpal tunnel if you keep working like that_ , Ennoshita had said, the last time he was in Tokyo and they met for a drink, and he’d made Keiji do wrist stretches in the izakaya until he could duplicate them to his professional satisfaction. Keiji stands up and rotates one wrist, then the other, as he walks down two flights of stairs and exits the building. The sudden burst of sunlight makes him blink, squint and cover his eyes with one hand. Round the corner, a few of his coworkers are on their smoke break. They wave to Keiji, and he nods back, heads the other way towards the welcome shade of the zelkova tree on the pavement.

_This is sudden._

Kenma’s reply comes right away, even though he’s left him hanging for a while. _bring your work with you. you can do it on the road anyway._

_i bought out two extra full page full colour ads in Weekly Shonen Vie this month._

_also i just got this._

After a moment, an image pops up on the message screen. It’s a slightly blurry picture of a driving licence, one with Kenma’s name on it and his thumb covering the photo.

Keiji zooms in on the picture. _Kozume Kenma._ He lowers his hand and leans back against the tree, looks up towards the clear blue sky. The shuffle of footsteps on concrete and the swing of an old, heavy door tells him his coworkers have headed back in, and he’s alone now, outside the office building. Tomorrow is the first day of July. It’s a Friday. It was a Friday, too, the last time they saw each other at a Jackals game. Kenma had disappeared while Keiji was talking to Osamu. He’d turned around, onigiri in hand and an extra one for good measure, just in time to see a familiar figure in a black hoodie nod at him from the top of the stands, then slip out quietly.

Keiji does not look at his calendar before replying. He slips his phone back into his pocket, looks at his watch, crosses the road and walks into the pharmacy there. Travel-sized packs of toothpaste, it turns out, are on offer.

* * *

At some point in his elementary school life, Keiji, like every other elementary schooler in Japan, owned a map. A standard map of Japan printed on recycled paper and bought from the stationery store, the kind that came folded up in quarters, with a crease that ran down the middle of Tokyo. He put that map up on his corkboard, carefully marked out everywhere he had visited with coloured pins. The yellow one, he’d saved for Hokkaido. For sunflowers. He never got to use it.

Keiji hasn’t seen his map in years in between all the moves and boxes, let alone his odd collection of thumbtacks, which lived in an empty fruit pastille tin. But he could swear that the yellow pin he saved was the exact shade of this Toyota Kenma’s rented, the light coming over the mid-morning horizon where the mountains meet the sky, the faded highlighter strips on Kenma’s backpack, thrown into the back seat.

“Why did they give us such a bright colour?” Kenma grouses, as he pulls out of the carpark and onto the road, and Keiji winds down the window, leans out to hide his smile against the landscape.

Furano is the first stop on their GPS, but Kenma barely looks at it as he drives, cruising down the highway and following the signs to the northeast. As if he’s been ready for this for a long time. Whatever _this_ is. The lavender, waiting for them. _Look at the flowers_ , Kenma had said, showing Keiji a photo on Farm Tomita’s SNS while they waited to board their flight at Haneda. _They’re blooming. What do you think lavender soft serve tastes like?_

Like vanilla, is what Keiji thinks. It probably tastes like vanilla, with the slightest floral scent, and it’ll be underwhelming, but they’ll be eating it surrounded by lavender in bloom. He has never been on a trip where he doesn’t know exactly what’s coming up next, and the day after, and the day after that. Where he doesn’t know the mileage between each stop and where the restrooms and combini are along the way. _You’re good at planning, Akaashi, and anyway, you like it, so._

Konoha’s words, the year they went on their training retreat to Kyushu and Keiji planned the whole itinerary. He hadn’t been wrong. But here in this new place, riding in the passenger seat with the summer wind at their backs, Keiji finds he is perfectly fine, after all, with not knowing what’s coming up next. Whatever Kenma has planned. Even if he has nothing planned. Keiji doubts that’s the case, knowing Kenma, but as he breathes out and lets his fingers tap an idle rhythm on his knee to the song on the radio, he feels his shoulders relaxing, his next inhale coming easy.

“Are you hungry, Akaashi?”

Keiji shakes his head. “I had onigiri on the plane. While you were sleeping.”

Kenma takes one hand off the wheel to rub his eyes, and yawns softly. Keiji had asked, when they got the keys, if he should drive, Kenma looked tired and really he didn’t mind, but Kenma shook his head and got into the driver’s seat before Keiji could say anything more, and if Keiji is honest with himself, he likes just being here for the ride. Enough to refrain from reiterating his offer. It’s been a while since he drove anyway, and he’s rusty. He allows himself this little bit of selfishness, holds back and enjoys the sight of Kenma behind a wheel. Kenma holds his course steady, his grip sure but relaxed. Sunglasses on his forehead, needle on the speedometer barely wavering, like he’s been doing this all his life.

“You’re a good driver,” Keiji observes.

Kenma’s lips curve at the corners, a tiny, barely perceptible upward quirk. “I’ve played a lot of driving games.”

“I beat you at Mario Kart once.”

“Once,” Kenma mumbles. His stomach lets out a small growl then, and he glances at Keiji. “Do you mind if we stop for breakfast?”

“It’s eleven,” Keiji points out.

Kenma sighs. “Brunch. _Food._ Early lunch? All you morning people, never giving me a break…”

Keiji smiles, and Kenma pulls over to the next family restaurant they see off the highway. He orders an oyakodon, and Keiji, though he’s not hungry, figures he should eat if this is meant to be _early lunch_ , so he opts for a simple bowl of kitsune udon as well as hot tea. Kenma gets a milkshake.

“So…” Keiji starts, as he slides the menus back under the table. “Why Hokkaido, suddenly?”

Kenma’s slumped forward, head pillowed in the crook of his elbow on his crossed arms. “My house is being renovated. It’s a big pain.”

He pulls his phone from his pocket, taps it a few times and turns the screen around to show Keiji a photo. It’s a small two-storey house set in a completely ordinary suburban neighbourhood, painted white, with wooden planking on the front porch. The only thing that makes it look like a _Kenma_ house from the outside is that the neighbours are enough of a distance away that you can’t look into each other’s windows. There’s probably a basement, too.

“You bought a house? Wait—you moved out of Nerima?”

Kenma nods. “My landlord wanted to move back in to the place I was staying. I guess I thought it would be nice, to have a place of my own. But….”

He scrunches up his face, in an expression of distaste so familiar Keiji’s transported, for a moment, back to a crowded gym that smells of sweat and muscle rub, spotlights in his eyes. Nekoma’s setter on the opposite bench during a timeout, looking for all the world like he’d rather be anywhere else. He never went anywhere else. He always stayed, and stuck it out, till the very end.

“Renovations take so long. I didn’t think about it. It’s annoying. And there were delays… anyway, my lease on my old place ended but this new house still wasn’t done. So I thought, I should go to Hokkaido.”

Kenma says all of this in the same matter-of-fact way, as if it makes perfect sense.

“When is your house going to be ready?” Keiji asks.

“One week? That’s what they said.” Kenma shrugs. “It’s almost done. They just need to repaint some stuff and fix the broken steps.”

“You’re living out of your backpack right now? For one week? And you’re just driving round Hokkaido, until your house is done?”

Kenma tilts his head to one side. “Yeah? I mean, it’s not like I have the best equipment with me, but I can stream anywhere… I guess I could also have done a vlog of this trip, to make it more worthwhile or something. But that sounds tiring. I’d rather not.”

Their food arrives, and Kenma tucks in with a quickly murmured _itadakimasu_. Keiji’s still staring as he picks up his chopsticks, distracted enough that when he snaps them, one splinters. How odd, to think of a Kenma who doesn’t live in Nerima any more, who won’t have the river in his backyard any more. This Kenma in front of him, who’s the one on the move now. Sometime in the ten-odd years Keiji’s known Kenma, looking at him has come to feel like he’s looking at a landscape; the view’s always been constant, but sometimes, the shadows shift and the dusk gives way to a subtle dawn. A door closes, a window opens.

“That’s amazing. I don’t know if I could do it,” says Keiji.

Kenma looks up from his oyakodon, and holds Keiji’s gaze a little too long. “You left Tokyo before I ever did.”

Keiji presses his hands into his lap, and then Kenma’s milkshake arrives and they don’t talk any more.

* * *

The last time they were in a place like this, it had been Keiji who was starving, in those halcyon teenage days when he could tuck away a bowl of rice followed by a bowl of noodles and still have space for onigiri on the way home. Kenma had ordered a milkshake too, back then. A strawberry milkshake. He was wearing a black T-shirt under his sweater, and they shared headphones listening to an album Keiji liked, and it was dark by the time they left.

Kenma’s face, warm against Keiji’s knuckles, even through his gloved hands. The way the hazy light in the winter mist made halos in the still air. Kenma’s bare hand, sliding up his neck, cupping his jaw as he reached to tip Keiji’s head down towards his lips. Strawberry and vanilla. The road receding behind them, ahead of them, so there was nowhere left to go, nowhere else they could possibly be. The next day, Tokyo’s first snow came in tender flurries and Keiji spent the whole day indoors, his phone pressed close to his chest in bed.

 _Details_ , he says so often to his mangaka. _Here, in the background—you need more details to set the scene._

They all complain. No one likes drawing backgrounds. But in the end, the details are what he remembers most of all. He will remember this: an old Nakashima Mika song and cool barley tea going down his throat, the shape of Kenma against the red faux-leather seat backing, his hair tucked behind one ear. The way he wears it pulled back now, like he doesn’t mind so much anymore if people see his face. One strand of his fringe falls loose, and Keiji’s fingers itch to reach out and tuck it back for him. Fortunately, Kenma beats him to doing it. Fortunately.

* * *

“Have you ever been to Hokkaido, Kozume?”

Kenma shakes his head.

Keiji puts down the book in his hands. He was fifteen when he’d read _A Wild Sheep Chase_ for the first time, and looked up pictures of the clock tower in Sapporo. Today, the book’s in his hands again, pages well-thumbed but still crisp, still more white than yellow. Keiji wraps all his books with great care, especially when he knows they’re going to be tossed into his gym bag.

This is how Keiji will think of the gym at Nekoma, years later. Not the skid and squeak of his shoes across the floor, not the Nekoma banner fluttering from the railing overhead, or the walk from the carpark where their bus always drops them off, over to the back of the school where the gym doors open up at the end of a pathway lined with maple trees. None of that, though it’s not that he’ll forget any of it either. But he will think of this: flame-red leaves falling at their feet, the red of Kenma’s school hoodie and how well it suits him, for all that Kenma doesn’t seem, at first glance, like someone who’s on fire. How the setting sun paints the ground all around them such a gold that Keiji could sink waist deep into it. How he’s learnt the pattern of these uneven tiles, and the crack in the concrete near the doorstep where they sit, he and Kenma, after practice. Keiji tells his team to go ahead, that he’ll make his own way home later, and when he heads out the back of the gym Kenma’s already there, waiting with his hands in pockets.

“I think I’d like to go, someday.”

Kenma doesn’t look up from the game in his hands. That doesn’t mean he’s not paying attention. Keiji first learned that about Kenma from the opposite side of a net, to his own peril, and he’s never forgotten it.

“Shibayama went once, with his family. They went skiing in Niseko. He said it was fun, even though he fell all the time… but it looked cold. I don’t like cold places.”

“In the summer, then,” Keiji says. “I hear it’s nice in the summer. Not as hot as Tokyo. And there are flowers.”

“Flowers sound nice,” Kenma murmurs.

It’s skirting the edge of cold now, right here in this schoolyard. The tip of Kenma’s nose is turning pink and he’s curled in snug upon himself, crouching with his knees hugged to his chest. He has just turned eighteen and his roots are growing out. He had dyed his hair, he told Keiji once, because he cared what people thought of him.

“And what about now?” Keiji asked.

Quiet. How quiet Kenma had been, when he answered him, the quiet of a ripple that knows the exact weight of the stone that made it, that does not need the water’s permission to exist. “They’re my friends now,” he said. He does not sound surprised to have friends any more.

It’s not like they ever agreed, in so many words or any words at all, to go to Hokkaido together. It’s not like they ever said anything about _together_ , then or later, or expected anything, when Kenma put his phone down and looked at Keiji, and Keiji looked back, and swallowed. This time, or any other time when the sunset happened upon them, and decided the silence here was too full already for anything to linger, light or shadow.

Apple juice. On his way home, Keiji will press his lips together, find them sorely in need of lip balm and something else that makes his heart ache, and he will stop in at a Family Mart to get a carton. _I’ve never seen you drink apple juice_ , his mother will remark. _I thought you didn’t have a sweet tooth._

That evening, Keiji sits at his desk, opens his notebook and writes at the top of a fresh page, _Hokkaido._ He makes a list of all the places you can see flowers. Years later, he will remember that list, and he will only remember half of what he wrote on it, and to his surprise he will be okay with that, more than okay with the memory of having lost something, so he can discover it all over again.

* * *

It’s well past midday when they drive into Furano and pull in to Farm Tomita. Keiji shuts the lid on his laptop and takes his glasses off for a moment to massage the bridge of his nose. When he opens his eyes again, the world is a pleasant blur of purple and yellow beyond the windsheld, and Kenma’s parked the car in front of the melon shop next to the flower fields.

He’d driven the whole way, in spite of Keiji eventually letting his conscience getting the better of him and offering to take over, after their rest stop at a petrol station to stock up on drinks and snacks. It had just started to rain, a fine on-off drizzle that made it feel more like springtime.

“It’s okay,” Kenma said. “You’re working. Anyway, I think I like driving.”

“You think?”

“Well, before this, it wasn’t like I had a lot of chances to drive. I haven’t bought a car in Tokyo.”

Keiji glanced up. “Why did you get your licence, then?”

“Because I wanted to come to Hokkaido. And I didn’t want you to be the only one driving.”

When Kenma says these things, he makes them sound perfectly logical. He learns to drive, so that he can come to Hokkaido. He wants to come to Hokkaido, and so he thinks of Keiji. Or maybe it is the other way round, should Keiji allow himself a moment of boldness, of selfish indulgence, in the privacy of his own imagination: Kenma thinks of Keiji, and so, Hokkaido. There is a daisy-chain of thoughts here that maybe Keiji could string together, if he tried, but he’ll never do it as effortless as Kenma does. He has never known anyone whose mind moves like Kenma’s does.

“Anyway, driving is nice. It’s peaceful.”

“It’s peaceful because I’m your passenger,” Keiji pointed out, and Kenma returned his knowing smile, and drove on without either of them naming names of absent friends.

As he steps out of the car now and takes in a full breath of fresh air, Keiji stretches his arms overhead, feels the crack in his shoulders give way in a deeply satisfying manner. Kenma leads the way into the shop, where they get one melon cup each and stand under the awning to eat.

“It’s sweet,” Keiji remarks, savouring his first bite.

“Mmm. It’s nice. I read about this melon shop, once. In your magazine.”

Keiji pauses, little plastic fork in his hand halfway to his mouth. “Really? But we don’t have a travel section.”

“It was a comic strip. A _yonkoma_. About a polar bear who travels from Tokyo to Hokkaido. I think he went in winter though. I don’t think he would have come in this season. His name was Maru-chan.”

Kenma pronounces all this very seriously. Keiji, in all honesty, barely has time to digest all the other content in the magazine that isn’t under his editorial purview and he’s always living a few issues ahead, so has only the faintest recollection of Maru-chan and his adventures in Hokkaido. It was a popular series, he thinks. Kids liked it. He resolves to look up Maru-chan in the magazine archives when he gets the chance.

“Do you read the magazine every week?”

Kenma nods. “I like the game review columns.”

“You were interviewed once. By Tsukimoto.”

“Yeah.” Kenma’s shoulders slump. “I don’t like being interviewed. But I thought I should say yes, once. Just to see what it’s like. And now I know. I don’t like it.”

Keiji laughs, and the look Kenma shoots him is more gently chagrined than offended, so he leaves it. He does not say, he remembers the interview well. He had come in to work that day, found the latest copy of the magazine fresh and crisp from the printers on his desk, and taken it into the pantry to read while waiting for the kettle to boil. There it was, a photo of Kenma on page 55. He was wearing a black cap with the Bouncing Ball Corp logo on it and holding a gamepad, gazing off the side of the page into the distance, his hair still chin-length and uneven at the ends. Keiji had not known this interview was coming out. He had not imagined Kenma would accept an interview at all. But the fact that Kenma was gaining a following on YouTube, that his streams of Monster Hunter World were popular and his tactical prowess generally admired—that much, Keiji had known. He’d even tuned in once, to one of Kenma’s live streams. He’d mentally clocked out of the gameplay after a while, but left it on in the background as he prepared dinner, Kenma’s calm voice accompanying him while he diced potatoes for curry.

Where the summer in Tokyo’s just started to be this side of unbearable, the kind of heat that presses in so much that Keiji feels it radiate off the concrete, the buildings closing in, summer in Hokkaido is still cardigan weather. Keiji looks up. The rain’s almost stopped, sun beginning to peek through the gaps, between clouds the colour of lampposts and telephone wires.

“Did you think this was what you were going to end up doing?” he asks Kenma. “Playing the stock market… and video games on YouTube?”

Kenma starts to shake his head, then pauses. He eats his melon slowly. Keiji’s almost done with his cup, and Kenma’s still only halfway through.

“I think that’s not a fair question,” says Kenma, at last. “Because it’s not like I knew what I was going to end up doing. Did you?”

“Fair point,” Keiji concedes.

“Also, I don’t think this is… hmm. I don’t think this is an _end_. I haven’t _ended up_ here.” Kenma turns to Keiji, and he’s smiling, or something adjacent to it; an arch upward quirk of his lips with slightly narrowed eyes, something that beckons the next level, the next quest. “We’re not even thirty yet, Akaashi. That’s a long way from an end.”

“Yeah,” Keiji murmurs. “Yeah, you’re right.”

* * *

At nineteen, Keiji makes a list of all the things he thinks he could be. He writes it by hand, neatly on the first sheet of a fresh new lined paper pad, and brings it to his mandatory career guidance session. His form teacher Handa-sensei compliments him on his excellent grades, his level head and his practicality, tells him he can certainly become an accountant, a government policy planner or a business development manager in a national corporation if he wishes, and ventures the opinion that perhaps _photographer_ or _editor in a publishing house_ might be a backup option. Not that he wouldn’t be capable of it, but a model student like Akaashi-kun could set his sights higher, aim for more prestige in his career.

Keiji thanks him for his insight, politely, sincerely, and enrols in a literature course. He gains slight myopia, shelves full of books in two different cities and a river of words that runs from Kobe to Tokyo, currents laced in silver and streetlights that he maps out with care, learns to navigate.

At twenty-six, Keiji stands on the edge of a lavender field and watches a boy he once kissed walk down the path, surrounded on either side by blossoming purple, and the river runs south, south, back to where it all started. It leaves his feet wet and his throat brimming.

Kenma has his hood down, his hair up in a messy half-bun with loose strands spilling out, the wind blowing them back. When he turns, the only words left for Keiji are: _do you see me like i see you? do you see me here, surrounded by lavender, looking at you look at me?_

* * *

_Akaashi Keiji’s packing list for a spontaneous roadtrip_

  * lip balm.
  * spare change for the gacha machines.
  * a worn-out old volleyball jersey you use these days as a sleeping shirt. it’s gone soft after so many cycles in the wash and still smells of your childhood home.
  * your old copy of _A Wild Sheep Chase_.
  * your spare glasses, the better to see with. it’s not like you’ve ever lost a pair, but you never know. one can never be too careful.



* * *

Their hotel room in Furano overlooks a back alley with a fire hydrant, some pipes, and the back room second floor window of what looks like a bookstore across the road. Keiji had fallen asleep before Kenma, to the dim light of his Switch in the dark. Kenma, curled up in his bed with his towel still round his shoulders and extra pillows propped up behind his back, took his eyes off his game for a moment to glance at Keiji and say _goodnight. sleep well_ , before Keiji closed his eyes.

He wakes early, naturally. It’s when he gets his best work done, sitting at the dining table with a sheaf of sketches and scripts that need marking up. But Keiji can’t remember the last time he woke up early with time to spare, the kind of early where he can stay where he is for a bit, lying on his back as he stares up at the ceiling, the quiet breathing of another person within reach.

Keiji gets up as silently as he can and puts the kettle on, makes himself a cup of tea. He slides the balcony door open and steps outside. The railing is cool, still damp with morning dew, and it smells of spring, a season out of time. If a flurry of cherry blossoms descended now on the road below him, Keiji wouldn’t have been surprised.

How many years has it been? Would he have gone back to Ueno Park, that day, and told his nineteen-year-old self to pull Kenma under the _sakura_ and kiss him again, to wrap his brown tartan scarf round Kenma’s neck and say he could wear it home? Would he have said, _keep it_ , not because he is all that generous, but because he wants this: Kenma to have something of his, to hang up a reminder of Keiji behind his bedroom door?

And if he had done that, would he be here now seven years later, watching the morning dawn on a lavender night, hazy light spreading across Kenma’s bed?

Keiji stands outside in the bracing morning chill for a while longer, finishing his tea, then steps back into the room to wash up. When he’s finished, Kenma’s still nestled in his blankets, chest rising and falling slowly.

Keiji touches him lightly on the shoulder. “Kozume.”

Kenma rolls over with a tiny groan, forearm falling over his face. “What time is it?” he mumbles.

“Tragically early. But if we don’t go, it’s going to be crowded at the Blue Pond.”

At that, Kenma lowers his arm and his eyes open wide. He drags himself up to sit slowly, pulling his knees to his chest, a movement so instinctive and familiar that Keiji reaches out before he knows it to brush his hair from his face. _Good morning,_ he mouths. The rising sun’s first rays on his wrist. Sheets still rumpled under his free hand. Then Kenma leans into his knuckles with a sigh, and Keiji realises what he’s doing, but he does not pull away because it’s early, too early for thoughts, too early for talk. Too early for Kenma to be startled by a touch that’s either careless or the very last thing from it. Even Keiji himself isn’t sure which it is.

* * *

After they check out, Keiji insists on driving. Kenma acquiesces, but he doesn’t nap in the car like Keiji thought he might. He’s awake, all the way. Gazing out the window, occasionally playing a rhythm game on his phone. The silence suits the morning, and Keiji doesn’t feel compelled to fill it up with conversation. Neither, it seems, does Kenma.

When they reach the Shirogane Blue Pond, It’s still chilly enough that Kenma wraps his arms round himself and shivers lightly, even though he’s got two layers of T-shirts on under that baggy sweater of his. Keiji blows into his hands to keep warm. There are only two other cars in the carpark. They walk down the uneven path towards the pond, twigs crunching under Keiji’s sneakers. Kenma moves quietly, as he always does. The trees form a canopy above them that makes Keiji feel like he’s walking down a tunnel into another world.

Then the pond comes into view: layers and layers of blue, glacier blue and spring blue and ocean blue, turquoise and aquamarine, blues that Keiji doesn’t have a name for. Blues that seem unreal, could surely exist only as a handful of light shimmering on the surface, ready to fade to nothing if Keiji looks too long. A watercolour painting taking its first real breaths out here in the cold. Far from the shore, in the depths of the pond, bare larches with their silvery trunks reach straight up to the misty sky. Keiji falls silent.

Kenma comes to stand next to him, hands in his pockets. When he finally speaks, his voice is soft. “It’s pretty. And quiet. I like it. If this was a fantasy game, this is the kind of setting where there would be a mermaid living in the pond. Who grants wishes.”

Keiji smiles. “Or maybe a man-eating mermaid.”

“Or maybe a man-eating mermaid,” Kenma agrees. “You can’t tell just from the surface.”

Keiji forms a frame with his fingers, finds a picture that’s famous far beyond the shores of Biei. He tilts his hands towards Kenma. “This is it. The iPhone wallpaper.”

Kenma nods. “I can see it. Do you still do photography?”

Keiji’s startled, for a moment. Kenma remembers. Then he feels silly; of course Kenma would remember, Kenma remembers everything. He shakes his head. “Not so much, these days. I thought of bringing my DSLR on this trip, but it’s been more than a year since I touched it. And…”

He trails off, watches the sun light up the pond. Kenma clasps his hands behind his back and says nothing. He doesn’t glance over like he expects Keiji to keep talking, or to explain anything. That’s always been Keiji’s favourite thing about being with Kenma.

“You take pictures of places because you want to remember them. Right? Or you want to capture their beauty. To hang on to them in some way. I think I felt like, maybe I didn’t have to do that on this trip.”

He’s changed. As the words leave his mouth, Keiji feels it acutely somewhere in his bones; he’s changed. There was a time he would have been trying to take all the photos he could in a spot like this. Photos of the pond, of the mountains and the light streaming through the scattering fog, photos of Kenma, too. To make memories real before they slipped through his fingers. But it’s been years, and he is tired of holding on tight to realities, of inscribing them neat and tidy between the lines of his life.

“I’ve read that the colour changes depending on the season. The time of day. Even whether there’s a wind blowing,” he adds.

“That means we should come again, sometime,” says Kenma.

Keiji glances at him, a moment too long, deliberate. Kenma’s gaze flicks back to the pond. Somewhere between _we_ and _again_ , between _should_ and _sometime_ , Keiji thinks he’s wandered chest-deep into the blue.

The gift shop at the carpark sells a tea whose only appeal is that it’s blue, a blue that Keiji would call unnatural, if he hadn’t just seen it out there in the pond. Still, Kenma makes a face and says he doesn’t like it. It tastes floral, and not in the good way. He leaves Keiji with the rest of it and gets a soft serve instead, and they stand outside the shop finishing their snacks as the carpark starts to fill up. Kenma spends the last of his spare change at the gacha machine and gets a tiny penguin for his troubles.

“I wanted the fox,” he mumbles, his brow crinkling.

With his free hand, Keiji gestures at his satchel. “Look in the front pocket. The right one… yeah, that one. There’s an owl-shaped pouch in it. It’s full of hundred yen coins. Take some.”

Kenma blinks in surprise, and stares up at Keiji.

“I figured you’d need some. You can buy me an onigiri at the next combini,” says Keiji, and smiles.

* * *

They stop by Takushinkan before lunch. At a museum excursion in middle school, Keiji had been captivated by a framed print of Maeda Shinzo’s _Bakushu senretsu_ ; as he stands now in front of the real thing, the streak of red wheat more brilliant, more arresting than he could have imagined against the verdant hills, Keiji feels like he’s stepped out of time. Biei is all around him in every season, Maeda’s landscape photographs in their element here in this quiet gallery, and outside the trees are yellowing and the sun is coming up like it never rained last night, or the day before. Then there’s the rustle of someone moving behind him and Keiji turns to see Kenma at the end of the corridor, stopping to look at a photo of fog in the dawn light. He is real and they are here, together. They have stepped out of time together.

At Shikisai no Oka, it is Keiji who wanders, first, into the lavender this time, closes his eyes and breathes in the gentle scent; and as Kenma drives down Patchwork Road later, past the oak trees and the rolling countryside, the pyramid of the Hokusei Hill Observatory disappearing behind them, Keiji unwraps a sachet of dried lavender petals and hangs it from the rearview mirror.

“Do you have a car in Tokyo?” Kenma asks.

Keiji shakes his head. “No. I sold the Honda when I left Kobe.”

“It was really rattly,” Kenma murmurs. “But the seats were soft. And comfy.”

“That’s because that car was so old that the leather was really broken in. I’m surprised I managed to sell it at all.”

“You took good care of it,” Kenma says.

Keiji tugs one end of a purple knot into place, leans back and rests his head against the window. It had been Kenma, then, curled up in the passenger seat of his Honda years ago, that one time he gave him a ride. He’d come to Osaka for a game convention, and Keiji had driven down all the way from Kobe, not that it was very far, not that he’d expected anything more than a dinner with an old friend, or to give him a lift back to his hotel. He had not planned for Kenma to say, _show me where you live_. He had not planned to drive them both back to Kobe and stand with Kenma under the lights of the Ferris wheel, the bay lapping at the harbour, to say to him, _the next time you come, I’ll bring you to Onigiri Miya, and you can try Miya Osamu’s food._

He had not planned for Kenma to remember his car, or any of this, and—yet.

* * *

Just outside Asahikawa, Keiji looks up from a map he picked up at their hotel at Furano. He starts to say _tomorrow, we can go to Hokuryu_ , and then his voice catches and stops at _tomorrow_ —

“Tomorrow is Monday,” he says. His hands fall slowly into his lap, the map already dog-eared in one corner from how often he’s been folding and unfolding it.

Kenma glances at him. “Where do you want to go?”

There is no judgement in his voice. If Keiji says this is it, that it’s time for him to go back to Tokyo, Kenma will nod and say okay and drive him to the airport.

Keiji, in his moment of need, reaches for the takeaway onigiri they got for lunch, unwraps one and takes a hearty bite. It’s good. The tuna is still warm. He looks at Kenma, steady behind the wheel. The road stretches endlessly both ways, before and behind them. He hasn’t seen the sunflowers yet.

“Let me call my editor,” he says.

Kenma gives him a small nod, and pulls over to the shoulder so that Keiji can step out. He takes out his phone and scrolls to his editor’s number. The silhouette of a bird passes him overhead, and he looks up, past the mountains, to watch a hawk or maybe a falcon circle in the sky, soar ever higher on the rising wind. If only this would do, if Keiji could send his editor the cry of that bird on the phone, the view from the road like this.

He presses the call button.

“Kimura-san? This is Akaashi. I’m very sorry to call you on a Sunday like this. The thing is, I’m actually in Hokkaido at the moment on some personal business… I’m working on the road, of course, and I’ll meet all my upcoming deadlines. I apologise for the inconvenience. Can I…”

When Keiji gets back into the car, Kenma’s got his seat inclined back and he’s curled up in it, catlike, eyes closed. He cracks one eyelid open as Keiji settles back in and fastens his seatbelt.

“Can we go to Sapporo tomorrow?” Keiji asks.

He doesn’t miss Kenma’s smile, genuine and bright and fleeting, doesn’t miss the way he’s smiling back either, his lips curving of their own accord.

“I asked my editor if I could stay till Tuesday. In exchange, I’ll drop in our Sapporo office and go through some work with the team there.”

“Okay,” says Kenma. “That sounds good.”

* * *

That night, as Keiji deposits his bags at the foot of his bed and watches Kenma shrug off his sweater, something makes him say out loud, “You know, if this was a manga that I was editing, we would have ended up in a hotel with only one bed by now.”

Kenma stares at him, then laughs. It’s a sudden, unexpected sound, Kenma’s laugh; Keiji’s heard it more and more over the years, but it never fails to catch him at least a little bit off guard. “Do you ever say to the mangaka: _this is too cheesy, it can’t possibly happen?_ ”

“No. Unless it’s really badly written. But it’s not that I think it happens all the time. I know readers love it, and we want to make them happy, so I leave it. Mostly.”

Kenma hangs up his sweater. “You’re good at your job. Even if you were in the literature department, you might have edited a novel like that.”

He’s probably right. Kenma has a good story sense, whether he knows it or not. It checks out. He’s been the quiet protagonist of his own RPG for as long as he can remember, after all, and maybe that’s why it’s so effortless, talking to him. They’ve always spoken the same kind of language.

Kenma’s brow is starting to furrow now, in the way it tends to when he’s working out the steps of a puzzle. “I can see why readers love it. But I don’t know, I don’t really like it. It’s too forced, isn’t it? Don’t you want your characters to make the choice themselves… rather than be thrown together like that?”

He makes an awkward smushing motion with his hands when he says _thrown together_ , like he’s bringing two dolls together to kiss, and Keiji can’t help the chuckle that escapes him. And maybe it’s the fact that he’s here, that he’s made at least one choice today that counts for something, maybe it’s Kenma loosening his hair from its elastic tie so it falls across his shoulders, maybe it’s the hour, the long day. Maybe it’s none of that and he doesn’t have an excuse for what he does next. Keiji can face that much honesty, at least.

“Hey,” he says. “Come here.”

He holds his hand out.

Kenma, after a pause that isn’t so much hesitation as it is taking the measure of Keiji, of the distance between them, comes, and Keiji wraps his arms around him, lightly at first, then tighter as Kenma starts to relax, burrows his head into Keiji’s shoulder.

They stand there for a while, silent, and then Kenma sighs, a sound that nestles into the folds of Keiji’s cardigan and stays. “Akaashi, look, we’re both not the type to beat around the bush. I think that’s why I feel like it’s easy to hang out with you—”

“What a coincidence. I feel the same,” says Keiji.

He can’t see Kenma’s face, but he can hear his voice go soft and in that softness, a steady fire. The colour of autumn leaves that once fell at their feet, the sort of burning that never goes out.

“So I’m just going to say it, okay? I didn’t ask you to come to Hokkaido with me to hook up. That’s not what I want. I like you, and I wanted to come here with you. That’s all.”

“I know,” Keiji murmurs. “I understand.”

He slides his hand up to rest on Kenma’s chin, and kisses him gently on the cheek. Kenma leans into it, their faces pressed warm together for a breath, before they both let go.

Kenma picks up a towel. “I’ll go take a shower first. You can think about dinner.”

Keiji steps back, sits down slowly on the edge of his bed and perches there for a moment before flopping back down on the covers. He brings his fingers to his mouth. They still smell of lavender.

* * *

They’re standing by the vending machines outside Ueno Station, where Keiji’s bought them both cans of milk tea because it doesn’t really matter what they drink, now, it’s not even like Keiji’s thirsty; only that they both have unfinished drinks in their hands and so they cannot enter the station, they cannot get on the platform yet because once they go in, board their different trains, they won’t see each other like this again. Not like this.

Keiji does not ask Kenma to stay, to get on the train with him. They graduated a week ago, and it’s been longer still since they played their last game facing each other across the net. They’ve hung up their jerseys, made their plans. Keiji’s signed a lease on an apartment twenty minutes’ walk to his university in Kobe.

“Will you miss Tokyo?” Kenma asks.

Keiji takes a slow sip, and considers.

The thing about being with Kenma, one of the many things he _will_ miss, even though he does not say it, and he trusts Kenma knows—the thing is, when Kenma asks a question like that, he means exactly what he says. _Will you miss Tokyo._ He does not mean, _will you miss me_.

“Yes,” says Keiji. In Ueno Park, a pink wind rises. Cherry blossom petals, scattered on the walkways, people swathed in pink as they jog, walk their dogs, spread a picnic to sit down by the grass. Breathing in pink, breathing out pink. If Keiji put his hand out now and closed his fist, took some Tokyo springtime away with him, his palm, too, would be pink, right where Kenma’s palm was pressed to it not half an hour ago.

He does not take it away with him. When they part, he touches the back of Kenma’s hand at the turnstiles, quick enough that no one will notice, deliberate enough that Kenma will know it’s not an accident. “Take care, Kozume.”

Kenma smiles. It lights up his face. “Yeah. You too, Akaashi.”

* * *

  * an eye mask, to sleep in the car when the sun’s in your eyes.  
(strangely enough, after two days, you haven’t slept at all. even when it’s quiet. especially when it’s quiet. you feel most awake then, watching the countryside go by, watching him drive.)
  * some apple-flavoured gummies.
  * the gloves you wore on that one date. just in case your hands get cold. or his.
  * a notebook and pen, so you can get work done, but also so you can write down everything you want to remember.  
(as it turns out, you don’t write down anything at all. you just don’t need to.)



* * *

Maybe it’s not the sunflowers. Maybe it’s him, standing in the middle of the maze at Hokuryu, surrounded by gold that used to be the colour of his hair. Maybe it’s you, thinking, how he’s grown taller, or that he hasn’t grown taller at all, it’s just that he used to be surrounded by people so much larger and louder than him and now it’s just him, him and the flowers up to his shoulders, sunlit as far as the eye can see and still, his face turned upwards is the most gently brilliant thing in the entire field. Look, he says, turning towards you with a smile as you walk towards him. That cloud is shaped like a Bulbasaur. And you laugh, because that is the last thing you were thinking of, and you want to take his face in your hands and kiss him until you both forget where you are, until you’ve both stood so still right there, for so long, all day, that people think you are both part of the field, the sun is kissing you both as well and you could drink it all in forever.

Or maybe, it’s just the sunflowers. Maybe.

* * *

After days of driving through countryside and landscapes right out of postcards, it is a strange feeling, at first, to be back in the city, but then Kenma drives past the Sapporo clock tower and Keiji feels something settle in his stomach, seeing it at last. He will look through his office stationery supplies when he gets back to Tokyo, and find a yellow pin.

Kenma drops Keiji off at his publisher’s Sapporo office, a modest brown building just a few blocks down from Odori Park. “Call me when you’re done. There’s no hurry.”

“I will,” says Keiji, and waves him off. Kenma glances out of the windshield towards the park, murmurs _I want corn_ and eases back into traffic, presumably in search of that sweet Hokkaido corn they hear so much about in Tokyo. Keiji watches him go with the slowly sinking realisation that he’s alone now, without Kenma for the first time in three days. He takes a moment to gather himself before he walks in.

“Akaashi!” Matsuda waves him over, when he steps into the second floor office. “Kimura called and said you’d be dropping by. What brings you up here?”

Matsuda has a pile of manuscripts on his desk and a perpetual chocolate donut smudge on his jacket that seems to move around every time Akaashi sees him. Today, it’s on the corner of his left lapel. This casual slovenliness hasn’t stopped him from becoming one of the fastest rising editors in the company, transferring from Tokyo to head the manga editorial department in Sapporo when they opened here.

Akaashi bows, then takes a sheaf of envelopes out of his satchel. “Some personal business. Thank you for having me here, Matsuda-san. Can I go through some of these edits with you?”

A secretary brings them two cups of tea. Matsuda somehow clears some space from his overcrowded desk, as if producing it from a pocket dimension. This is, Keiji’s often observed, a magical skill all editors seem to have. He spreads his sheets on the table.

“You look way more relaxed than the last time I saw you in Tokyo,” Matsuda remarks when they’re done and Keiji’s marking up the last of his changes in careful pencil. “Hokkaido’s air is probably good for you.”

Keiji smiles. “It’s really nice here in Hokkaido. I’ve enjoyed my time here. I’ll just scan these and be on my way.”

He stands, then pauses. “Actually, while I’m here—do you know this _yonkoma_ , by the way? About Maru-chan the polar bear.”

“Ah, the one who took the train from Tokyo to Hokkaido!”

“Yes, that one. The friend I’m travelling with mentioned it to me. Could I take a look at it in the archives?”

Matsuda taps a quick search query into his computer, scribbles a list of numbers on his notepad and tears the sheet off for Keiji. “Those are all the issues with Maru-chan. The archive room is at the end of the corridor one floor up.”

Keiji’s always liked going into archive rooms. It’s the same reason, he thinks, he found himself taking up literature in the first place, going into this line of work; there’s nothing like the smell of well-loved books and print, nothing like the satisfaction of standing in front of a neatly indexed shelf and running your fingers across the spines of old volumes. Archive rooms are also typically empty, which suits him well.

He picks out all the issues that Matsuda’s written down, brings the stack over to a small table and begins to read. One chapter, then the next, until he loses track of time and the pile grows ever smaller.

His memory had been right, and Kenma’s description accurate enough, when he said the comic was about a polar bear who travelled from Tokyo to Hokkaido in the winter, and ate melons and went skiing, among other things. What Kenma hadn’t told him is that Maru-chan doesn’t go back to Tokyo, after his tour of Hokkaido. Maru-chan goes north. He keeps going north, all the way up to Wakkanai at the very northernmost tip of Japan, and he rides an ice floe across the Sea of Okhotsk till he gets to the waters round Sakhalin, where he meets a seagull who shows him the way to the Arctic. And it’s in the Arctic that Maru-chan settles down at last, after his long journey, lying back in the snow and staring up at the clouds like he knows he’s home.

Keiji assumes that’s the end. But then he turns the page, and in the very last strip of the _yonkoma_ , the final chapter, Maru-chan goes to the mailbox and there are postcards from Tokyo and a care package of his favourite curry from his friends, and he smiles, and so does Keiji when he closes the magazine.

He looks up. The shadows have shifted, falling long across the floor now. Keiji takes his phone from his pocket. It’s nearly dinner time and there are three messages from Kenma. He opens them up as quickly as he can, prepared to type his apologies, but all there is is: _got it. it’s sweet. you should try some._ A picture of Kenma’s hand, holding up a half eaten corn cob. Then a picture of a cat on a bench in the park. There’s no explanation for the cat.

Keiji puts back all the issues of the magazine, takes his leave with a grateful bow to Matsuda and the receptionist at the front of the building, and steps outside into the sun. He calls Kenma.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” comes Kenma’s voice down the phone, close enough that Keiji’s going to see him soon, and his heart is tight in his chest.

* * *

In Otaru, the glass birds sing in Keiji’s hands and the wind carries a music-box melody down the cobbled pavements, all the way to the bay. Kenma stops by the canal, next to one of the Victorian street lamps. A flowering vine grows up the wall of the warehouse on the opposite bank. Keiji looks at it and thinks, even summer has found its way here, thinks, he can’t let this end today.

“Kozume.”

Kenma glances over. Keiji turns to hold his gaze. How remarkable, those eyes. They never missed anything, in the past; over the years, they’ve managed to grow sharper and more gentle, at the same time.

“I know we’re not here to hook up. I don’t want to hook up. But I want this. Whatever we are, right now. I want it to last. I think back then, we were too sensible to make it work, and now…”

Kenma’s lips twitch with barely concealed amusement. “Now we’re less sensible.”

Keiji laughs. “Yeah. Look at us. Running away together to Hokkaido. But you know, I think we turned out okay.”

“I think so too,” says Kenma.

“I think, I might be happy, even if I never became a literature editor. Although I might still, some day. I think I’ve learned that most doors never really slam shut. Who knows, maybe we’ll even end up playing volleyball together again in the future.”

“I wouldn’t count on winning if I were you,” Kenma remarks. “My reflexes are pretty sharp from playing six hours of video games every day.”

Keiji raises his eyebrows. “Is that a challenge? You know I’d never back down from one.”

Kenma shoots him a knowing smirk in answer. He shifts away from the lamppost, then, closer to Keiji, and nudges his arm with his elbow, stays where he is so the weight of him against Keiji is real, unmistakably real.

“Are you happy now, Akaashi?” Kenma asks.

“Yes,” says Keiji. “Yes. I am.”

Kenma’s hand finds his. He laces their fingers together, then quickly tiptoes to press a kiss to the corner of Keiji’s mouth, and when he steps back and lets go, his gaze is clear. He doesn’t say anything, just leans on his forearms to look out at the canal, like this is the most natural thing in the world; Keiji’s hand already missing his touch, the two of them, side by side in a silence that will linger sweetly.

Kenma’s been waiting for him, all this while. No, Keiji corrects himself. That’s not fair to Kenma. Someone like him wouldn’t do something like sit around and wait for Keiji, and Keiji wouldn’t want that for him anyway. But they don’t do things by accident either. Maybe they’ve been walking towards each other for eight years, and this was simply all the time they needed, to get here. To become the people they had to be, to get here.

“You don’t have to travel round Hokkaido while waiting for your renovations to be done. You can fly back with me tonight. Stay at my place,” says Keiji.

“Thanks for offering. I think it’d be nice to spend a few more days here,” says Kenma, gazing out at the water. Then he turns to Keiji, and his face is radiant, lit by the afternoon sun. “But I’ll come find you when I’m back home.”

* * *

_both kuro and shouyou were like_  
_you should buy a fancy apartment in roppongi!!!!  
_ _but that’s so not me._

_It is not. I agree._

_anyway, here’s the address._

Keiji gets off at Nippori station, and buys onigiri and milk tea from the combini. Yanaka is a short stroll from here. He passes through a hodgepodge little street of neighbourhood sundry shops, pottery stores, grocers and a modest temple at the corner, where a cat walks out and brushes past him before disappearing down an alley. Keiji decides to take it as some kind of housewarming blessing.

There it is. The little house that Kenma had shown him in that photo, in a family restaurant off a highway in Chitose. Had it only been two weekends ago? Time, thinks Keiji, does funny things the older he gets. The house had been white, in the photo, now it’s been painted a warm shade of buttery yellow that goes with the wooden patio. Not so bright Kenma would complain about it, but brighter, perhaps, than he would have chosen before. Keiji opens the gate to walk in and ring the bell. At the front door, there hangs a lavender ornament he once tied with a knot to the rearview mirror of a rented Toyota.

The door opens. He's standing in the hallway with his hair still mussed, looking like he just woke up. Keiji looks at his watch. Eleven o’clock.

“Good morning,” he says, and holds up his plastic bag. “I brought breakfast.”

Kenma smiles, and opens the door wider.

**Author's Note:**

> lumenera made lovely fanart of [the scene where Kenma is standing in the lavender](https://lumenera.tumblr.com/post/617333311159894016/kenma-has-his-hood-down-his-hair-up-in-a-messy). thank you!
> 
> Some travel notes/pics if you want visuals!  
> \- [Farm Tomita](https://www.farm-tomita.co.jp/en/east/)  
> \- [Shirogane Blue Pond](https://hokkaido-labo.com/en/biei-blue-pond-4197) (which was an [iPhone wallpaper](https://web.500px.com/photo/8667352/Blue-Pond--The-WallPaper-for-Apple-Inc-by-Kent-Shiraishi/))  
> \- [Takushinkan Photo Gallery](https://kimi-tourguide.blogspot.com/2012/06/takushinkan-photo-gallery-biei.html) ( _Bakushu senretsu_ is the last picture)  
> \- [Hokuryu Sunflower Field](https://www.kyuhoshi.com/sunflower-field-in-hokuryu/)  
> \- [Otaru Canal](https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e6701.html)  
> \- Bonus locations in Otaru indirectly referred to but not shown: [Kitaichi Glass](https://travel.joogostyle.com/kitaichi-glass-otaru/), [Otaru Music Box Museum](https://travel.joogostyle.com/otaru-music-box-museum/)
> 
> Thank you for reading ♥ it means a lot to me. This fic, in many ways, is one I've always wanted to write for Akaken, but never felt able to until now when canon has given us a look at their post-university lives. Akaken are my Haikyuu!! OTP and I am happier than I can say to finally write this for them. I hope you enjoyed the ride. 
> 
> I'm on [Twitter!](https://twitter.com/lightveils)


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